On April 12, 2012, the Fondation Gabriel Péri hosted a meeting on the theme of “Stalin and Stalinism in history”, with historian Nicolas Werth and philosopher Domenico Losurdo. [1] [2] Here is Domenico Losurdo’s keynote address.
Philosophers like to question not only historical events, but also the categories with which we interpret these events. So which category is used to interpret Stalin today? That of bloodthirsty madness. This category has already been used against Robespierre, the 1848 revolution and the Commune, but never against the war, Louis XVI, the Girondins or Napoleon. As far as the 20th century is concerned, we have psychopathological studies on Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao, but not, for example, on Churchill. Yet the entire Bolshevik leadership was against colonial expansionism, while Churchill wrote “war is a game to be smiled at.” Then there was the carnage of the First World War. The Bolshevik leadership, including Stalin, was against this carnage, but Churchill still declared: “War is the greatest game in the history of the world, we are playing the highest stake here, war is the one acute meaning of our lives.” So why the psychopathological approach in one case and not the other?
So which central category can we start from? To reflect on this, I will quote Nicolas Werth: “The matrix of Stalinism was the period of the First World War, the revolutions of 1917 and the civil wars, taken as a whole. I fully share this view. So we have to start with the First World War. The origins of Stalinism lie not in an individual’s thirst for power, but in the permanent state of exception that set in with the First World War. But we need to take into account not just the First World War, but the whole period of the Second Thirty Years’ War, because even after the Treaty of Versailles, everyone sensed that there would be a Second World War. And this war will affect the Soviet Union and the West in different ways. The war in the East, against the Soviet Union and before that against Poland, is a colonial war. And today, eminent scholars characterize the war against the Soviet Union as the greatest colonial war in history. And I would add that this war was not just a colonial war, but a slave war explicitly aimed at the reintroduction of slavery. We can read about Hitler or Himmler. The latter, speaking at a meeting of Nazi leaders, declared “between us I can speak with clarity: we need slavery “. Well, if Hitler-led Germany was one of the protagonists of this colonial and slave war, Stalin-led Soviet Union was the other, antagonist.
We can also place this war in a long-term perspective. There’s another slave war to mention: Napoleon’s war against Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were the protagonists of a resistance to slavery, just like Stalin. And in this connection I want to draw attention to the fact that Stalin was not just the protagonist of Stalingrad: even before October, he considered that Russia was in danger of becoming a colony: The Entente powers,” he writes, “claim to behave in Russia as they do in Central Africa. I’ll quote him again: the question of the Revolution is “the liberation of Russia”. So Stalin already saw the danger of Russia becoming a colony.
Now for the “but there’s the Hitler pact” objection. First of all, if there was a race to compromise with Hitler, Stalin lost it: These included the Third Reich’s concordat with the Holy See, the agreement with the Zionists, and the naval agreement with Great Britain, which prompted Hitler to write “this is the happiest day of my life”. And then, of course, there was Munich. But that’s perhaps not the most significant point. Here again, I’ll draw a comparison with the politics of Toussaint Louverture, who was far more anti-conformist. So, in early 1794, he was fighting with Spain and England against France (yes, he was suspicious of France). And no one considers him an accomplice of the Ancien Régime: Toussaint Louverture and his followers may have made mistakes, but the fact remains that they were protagonists in the first great struggle against the colonialist and slave-owning system…
So far, I’ve only talked about the epic and not the tragedy, but the two things “work” together, because with the October Revolution, there’s already a messianic expectation: power, the raison d’état, states, nations, all that was going to disappear… There’s even a philosopher, Ernst Bloch, who thinks the Soviets will turn power into love! At the time of Lenin’s NEP [New Economic Policy], tens of thousands of workers were literally tearing up their party cards, disgusted by the NEP, which they had renamed “New Extortion of the Proletariat”. Stalin, who of course lacked Lenin’s personality, insisted on building socialism in Soviet Russia, but above all on the question of national liberation: he invited people to study technology, to become masters of science. The class struggle, he thought, lay in the conquest of technology and science in this remote situation.
When Walter Benjamin visited Moscow in December 1927, he said that for many people, Bolshevism was the crowning achievement of Peter the Great, but Trotsky compares Stalin not to Peter the Great but to Nicholas II: and so the Stalinist regime must be inflicted with a fate analogous to that inflicted on Nicholas II’s regime. Trotsky then called Stalin Hitler’s butler, a provocateur in Hitler’s service. In turn, Stalin used the same language against Trotsky and others. The civil war was already here. From his point of view, as a revolutionary, Trotsky had not only the right but also the duty to overthrow Hitler’s so-called butler. The civil war was already here, even on an organizational level. In my book, I quote Ruth Fischer, who says that in 1927 there were already opposing parties and military apparatuses.
Ideological struggle becomes civil war: unfortunately, this is the history of all great revolutions. The civil war in Russia was particularly horrific, that’s for sure. How can we understand this particular horror? The question is to think of the categories that make it possible to understand this particular horror. On this subject, a well-known historian in the Western world, Robert Conquest, says that mental aberrations are only peculiar to the French and Russians, and foreign to the Anglo-Celts. But how is the use of Anglo-Celts as a key to explanation different from the (Nazi) use of Aryans? For my part, in order to understand the particular horror of this civil war in Soviet Russia, I’m going to quote Nicolas Werth again, when he speaks of “the collapse of all authority and institutional framework”.
Let me add that it wasn’t just a battle of personalities. There was a struggle between different principles of legitimizing power.
What’s more, the civil war in Soviet Russia is characterized by the fact that both opposing parties have experience of conspiracy and clandestine struggle, and share the need underlined by Lenin in “What to do” to agitate, even in the army, the police and the state apparatus, of course by camouflaging and hiding, sometimes speaking an “esopic language”. It should also be noted that even the Khrushchev report speaks of false denunciations and “provocative accusations “made either by “genuine Trotskyites”, who could thus “take revenge” and confuse the state apparatus, or by “careerists without conscience”, ready to make their own way by the most despicable means.
The dominant ideology compares gulag and konzentrationslager in Nazi Germany. In my book I talk about the “absent third party”. Because there are other concentration camps. Mike Davis evokes the militarized labor camps of colonial India in the late 19th century, using the expression “extermination camps”. An Italian historian (Angelo Del Boca) speaks of extermination camps for Libyans locked up in the camps of liberal Italy. If we compare the different camps, we see that there is a similarity between Nazi concentration camps and colonial camps, because in both cases, the rule is racial rule.
Ideology also plays a role in horror. The most horrifying period was the collectivization of agriculture. Bukharin rightly spoke of the danger of a “St. Bartholomew’s Night”. Finally, military concerns played a decisive role in collectivization, which in no way detracts from the horror.
You have to distinguish between horror and mythology. After the French Revolution, mythologies had already spread, such as Robespierre wanting to become King of France, or the genocidal Robespierre who, according to Babeuf, wanted to implement a “system of depopulation” in the Vendée*. The October Revolution and the Stalinist period gave rise to other mythologies.
The central question is: is Nazism the twin brother of Communism, or is it the continuation and radicalization of the colonial tradition and the racial ideology that accompanied it? This is a very important question. As a philosopher, I asked myself about the key words of Nazi ideology. One of these is untermensch, or sub-human. This word comes from the translation of the expression under man, used by Lothrop Stoddard in the United States. We find in Nazism this category of the colonial tradition and racist ideology of the United States: white supremacy. Similarly, if the Nazis spoke of “racial hygiene”, Lothrop Stoddard spoke of “race cleaning”, “race purification” and, more generally, “the science of ‘Eugenics’ or ‘Race Betterment’”. Even the decisive term “final solution” comes from the United States, where the Black or Indian question was referred to as the “ultimate solution” or the “final and complete solution”.
Indeed, British and Western colonialism have long been compared to Hitler’s colonialism. Gandhi said: “In India we have a Hitlerian government, do we have to disguise it in lighter terms?”, “Hitler was Britain’s sin.” On the other hand, he said this “great man” about Stalin.
In conclusion, the horror of the Stalinist period is indisputable, but we cannot forget that Stalin was a protagonist of the anti-colonial struggle, just as if we want to understand Hitler, we have to start from the history of colonialism. All the harsh judgments against Stalin cannot avoid this fact: after the October Revolution and after Stalin, we see colonialism disappearing, while the central categories of Nazi ideology stem from the colonial tradition and racial ideology of the West.